Our View: Executive orders on gun control wouldn't stop Adam Lanza

Sunday

Jan 20, 2013 at 9:00 AMFeb 7, 2013 at 11:04 AM

For all the attention over President Barack Obama's 23 executive orders Wednesday signed in the name of preventing gun violence, there actually was very little to justify the claims — for or against — that the orders received.

Certainly, none of the proposals would have stopped Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old shooter whose attack on school children in Newtown, Conn., prompted this.

The orders Obama issued on background checks would not have stopped the Newtown attack because Adam Lanza's mother, who purchased the weapons, successfully passed such a background check.

Orders related to access to mental health would not have stopped Lanza. His family already had such access, and psychologists say predicting such behavior is largely impossible.

The order on school resource officers — similar to an earlier proposal by the National Rifle Association — would not have stopped Lanza. The Newtown school district, like many other U.S. schools, already had resource officers but only assigned them to the high school and middle school.

Obama's calls for Congress to ban future sales of semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15, or of ammunition magazines carrying more than 10 rounds, also would not have prevented the crime. Such proposals supposedly would not apply to equipment already owned — which would have excluded the Lanza family's rifle and magazines.

Still, the package with a $500 million price tag does contain several positive measures.

For one, it removes a ban on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzing firearms suicide data. (More than half of all gun deaths are suicides.) The CDC collects information on all U.S. deaths. Studying that could help hospitals better treat various wounds. It could identify particularly nasty bullets that, all things considered, shouldn't be available to civilians. It could help mental health professionals ask better questions of their patients who own or use guns. Yet Congress blocked such CDC funding and, for the years 2001-10, the CDC does not know what kind of firearm was used in 61.7 percent of all firearm suicides.

Other orders also would not have stopped Lanza, but still make sense. There has been no permanent director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms since 2006, and the agency had several resignations in the wake of its "Fast and Furious" gunrunning scandal. The Senate has held up nominee Andrew Traver over his ties to gun control, but we believe an up-or-down vote is overdue.

We also support the order for a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign. The government and NRA should work together on a campaign, like those against drunken driving, for gun safety and, separately, mental health awareness. They also might promote gun lockers — not just trigger locks — for general storage.

Indeed, complaints of the orders being unconstitutional seem off base. Presidents George H.W. Bush (1989) and Bill Clinton (2001) used executive orders to actually restrict certain types of firearms. Obama's 23 orders did not restrict any.

That may be the right course. U.S. firearm homicides have fallen to their lowest levels since at least 1981 (http://factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/), despite record gun sales. In fact, there are more than 3 million AR-15s in the U.S., nearly all owned by responsible citizens more interested in stopping home invasions than anything else. Chicago, which virtually bans guns, saw homicides jump 15 percent to 513 deaths last year. The vast majority were due to handguns.

President Obama's 23 orders won't halt an Adam Lanza, but nor will they limit freedoms of responsible, law-abiding citizens.